It is estimated that between 30 and 50 % of all the food that is produced for human consumption ends up getting wasted. This project addresses the problem of food getting wasted, focusing mainly on questions to do with how this happens. More specifically, the project puts an emphasis on how everyday life concerns, material environments and technologies impact consumers' wasting and non-wasting practices. While consumers, their hopes and wishes, background, intentions and attitudes may be relevant for elucidating sentiments about food and waste, a focus on what consumers do provides us with concrete examples of how good (and bad) practices may be further strengthened and cultivated. In this sense, the project represents an effort to think beyond the individual consumer, and include supermarket strategies, storage technologies, recycling facilities, consumption techniques and the different kinds of materiality of foods as what comes to play a role in food waste and food saving.
Thus, the project is an attempt to also highlight the notion that consumers and their behavior are not the only possible factors when food gets wasted. If we wish to reduce food waste, then, efforts must be made in various places along the food supply chain, in retail, and in recycling and waste management. It is not enough to inform and educate consumers.
The project contributes to an understanding of food waste that factors in the problems in reducing food waste on the one hand, and highlights the possibilities for realizing less wasteful practices, on the other hand. As such, the project both puts into question the current emphasis on individual consumers in waste policy and campaigns, while attending to how consumers develop creative ways of developing their own anti-wasting practices.
The overall objectives of the project are: 1) to gain insight into how consumers in Denmark and Sweden handle their food in everyday life, how they use it, waste it and/or avoid wasting it; 2) develop an original theoretical repertoire that enables the framing of pertinent questions and helps to conceptualize the insights gained; 3) develop innovative ethnographic methods which make it possible to research relevant household practices and to differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ practices; 4) contribute to developing food care techniques that help to avoid food wasting.
